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On Thursday the FAA released an entirely new kind of map that will open up controlled airspace for drone pilots. To date, controlled airspace was a broad five-mile radius around an airport that restricted drone flight.
The new three dimensional grids are less draconian. Instead of indiscriminate five-mile circles around an airport, actual flight paths and neighborhood boundaries are taken into account. Operators will still need authorization to use the airspace, but the new maps remove some ambiguity and will result in more commercial drone flights — from inspections to drone deliveries — in thousands of neighborhoods around the country.Drones operate in an airspace that, for the first 75-some years of its existence, the FAA didn’t have to expend a lot of time or resources on. This week’s news represents a huge step forward.
And earlier this month, at the FAA UAS Symposium in Virginia, the agency sent another strong signal that changes are coming for drones: It announced that third-party developers will soon be able to communicate with FAA systems. The interface will move from phone calls and filling out forms to integrations with the tools and applications operators already use in their drone operations.
Let’s take a closer look at these two developments.
The new maps
Commercial operators are the ones most affected by the new airspace maps. These operators are the most risk-averse and dependent on operating in urban areas. As a rule of thumb, many chief pilots that I’ve spoken to in the past have said they simply will not operate in controlled airspace due to the risk of a violation. This blocks vast numbers of potential commercial drone flights from ever taking off.
Knowing the airspace you’re going to operate in is a key first step of any flight, but it’s probably the one that is most confounding to…
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